Microsoft wants to bring data and machine intelligence closer together

For Microsoft, the last year or so has been all about infusing its various products with “intelligence.” Those smarts may come in the form of advanced analytics or deep learning, but the main point here is that the company believes these techniques can solve major pain points for its customers, whether they are PowerPoint users or SQL Server admins. Today, at its Data Amp event, the company is launching a number of updates that make it easier for developers who use Microsoft’s tools to bring “intelligence” to their own apps.

At today’s event, Microsoft is launching updates to the preview of SQL Server 2017 (technically, this is the Community Technology Preview 2.0), which will likely become generally available later this year (no surprise, given its name), as well as its Cognitive Services. SQL Server 2017, it’s worth noting, is also the first version to run on Linux and in Docker containers.

As Microsoft’s Rohan Kumar, the company’s general manager for database systems, told me, the basics of database management have essentially been commoditized now. What users are looking for now is better ways to get value out of the data they are storing. What Microsoft’s partners were telling it was that it was still too hard to build intelligence into applications and that they wanted more of that intelligence to be directly available in the database.

So with today’s update, Microsoft announced that it is building support for Python right into SQL Server 2017. That may sound like a minor thing at first, but the vast majority of machine learning frameworks rely on Python. Making it easier to access Python scripts right from the database means it’s also easier to use machine learning techniques on this data instead of having to first move it out of the database, let it go stale and then try to build machine learning models on it.

Indeed, it’s this idea of bringing data and AI closer together that’s driving many of these decisions.